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Unfortunately Windows is still a necessary evil sometimes: I keep a Windows virtual machine for times when it's absolutely necessary, and I still give my friends Windows tech support. I still like to do things properly, and so I wanted to create a Windows XP install CD with Service Pack 3 slipstreamed in1. I had two CDs to do, and slipstreamed the first one using a Windows VM, but then got curious and wondered if I could do it without Windows. The answer is that it is possible using Wine to run the service pack installer. I followed this blog post (which was interesting since it's in French), but I then found another blog post which explains it in English. The steps are as follows:
It seems to be quite particular about the ISO9660 settings and the upper case filenames, so if it doesn't boot check the settings.
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I was looking through a list of DNS record types, and noticed the SSH Host KeysThe
The SSH client needs to be configured to check these records. Specifying " GPG KeysThe To determine the name of the record to use, convert your email address into a domain name by replacing the ampersand with a dot1. To publish your entire public key, run the tool as follows.
The first parameter specifies the file containing your public key in binary format, and the second parameter specifies the domain name to use. To publish a reference to your public key, run the tool as follows.
The first parameter specifies the fingerprint of your key, and the second parameter the URL at which the public key can be found. It is also possible to only publish the fingerprint or only the URL. Simply add the record which the tool outputs to your zone file2. There is also another method to publish GPG keys called PKA. The only documentation I can find is a specification in German linked from the blog post mentioned above. I still managed to set it up though. This method uses a
This specifies the fingerprint and URL, just as with the second |
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I discovered that OpenVPN supports connections through an HTTP proxy server. This makes it possible to establish a VPN from a completely firewalled network where the only external access is through a proxy server1. It takes advantage of the fact that SSL connections are simply tunnelled through the server and aren't interfered with like unencrypted connections. The server setup is almost identical to a normal configuration, except that the tunnel must use TCP instead of UDP (since the proxy server will establish a TCP connection). Since most proxy servers only allow SSL connections to certain ports, you will also need to change the port number that the server listens on. The best is 443 since that is used for HTTPS, but if the server is also running a web server on port 443, then 563 is probably the next best choice. This port is assigned to NNTPS, and is allowed by the default Squid configuration. The following two lines enable TCP connections and change the port number.
The client configuration is also very similar. It simply needs to enable TCP connections, set the correct port number, and specify the proxy server.
OpenVPN can also authenticate to the proxy server using either Basic or NTLM authentication. To enable this add "
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I have been using Gmail for a while now, and really think that it's about the best email provider out there. I recently moved my mail over from Google Apps to my own server, but I wanted the major features that I liked. I've always used a desktop mail client and used POP3 and SMTP to receive and send mail. These are the features I particularly like:
I therefore set out to recreate this setup as closely as possible. The first two are satisfied by a standard Postfix setup with TLS and SMTP AUTH. The last one is done with Dovecot and Roundcube. To automatically store sent messages on the server, I used Postfix's
To make POP3 access independent from IMAP, I first configured Dovecot to use a different mail location for each as follows.
I then used the following Procmail recipe to send incoming messages to both locations.
At the moment this is only setup for my user, but it should be possible to do it for all users by creating a global |
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As most people know, email is horribly insecure. It is trivial to forge the Unfortunately all of these schemes have problems due to the fact that they are an addition to the existing mail system. SPF and SenderID prevent plain forwarding (requiring additional schemes like SRS or whitelisting of forwarders), and MTAs and mailing lists which modify messages break DomainKey and DKIM signatures. Despite these issues, email forgery is an issue which needs to be addressed, and we cannot wait for a perfect solution before adopting it. Some major mail providers (including Gmail and Yahoo) are already implementing these schemes. I have therefore configured SPF and DKIM in my Postfix mail setup. My SPF policy allows mail from my server and SOFTFAILs all other hosts, and all outgoing mail is signed with DKIM. Incoming mail is checked for SPF and DKIM, but aren't discared even if the checks fail. I will be keeping an eye on things and will revise my policy when I think it safe. SPF ConfigurationTo create an SPF policy, add a TXT record to your DNS records according to the SPF syntax. The policy should authorise all hosts from which you send mail. (Mine simply authorises my mail server since I send all mail through it.) You also need a policy for the hostname presented by your mail server in its HELO/EHLO command. You should also create policies for all subdomains which aren't used for mail. To check SPF records for incoming mail, I used the SPF policy daemon for Postfix. It is packaged for Ubuntu as DKIM ConfigurationTo sign and check DKIM I use DKIMproxy. There isn't an Ubuntu package so I installed it from source. The instructions on the site are good, and include details for Postfix. You will need to generate a key to sign with and publish it in DNS, and then configure Postfix to sign outgoing messages and validate incoming messages. DKIMproxy won't discard messages with invalid signatures by default. DKIM includes a component called ADSP which allows domains to publish their signing policy. The strongest policy states that all messages are signed with DKIM and any messages without signatures should be discarded. This will allow mail servers to reject messages not sent through your mail server. However, the standard is not finalised yet, and issues regarding mailing lists still need to be addressed. |
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